SitePoint has a new article posted this morning for anyone out there looking for a good way to automate their PHP scripts (on a *nix based machine) - Introducing Cron.

In this article, they're doing more to introduce you to the cron module in *nix to help you automate things, but the example they give is a small PHP script that emails you results from a stock price each day at 4:00pm. It's a pretty simple article and just gives some general setup tips, but is a great starting place.

Of course, there's no limit to what you can do when combining PHP and cron - anything you can think of to do in a regular PHP script (that doesn't require human input) can be dumped to a cron job and automated to make your life easier. Even common sysadmin tasks, such as cleaning up spam or swapping out log files can be done quickly and easily with a small PHP script written correctly...